Olivia Vásquez and her mother, Olivia Ponce.
Photograph: Amanda Holpuch for the Guardian

It’s not a party at Olivia Ponce’s house unless it ends with people discussing what to do if US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) knocks on the door.

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It’s a dark notion to some, but Ponce, who is undocumented, is proud that whenever she is celebrating with friends they will inevitably start talking about their right to remain silent and the importance of keeping your door closed when immigration agents arrive on the doorstep.

Her 24-year-old daughter, Olivia Vásquez, sighed with a look of exasperation and pride: “It always turns into a know your rights party.”

The mother and daughter are one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of immigrants in America now trained to respond when Ice arrives at their home, raids their workplace or shows up at their children’s school.

So far, Donald Trump is deporting fewer people than former president Barack Obama did in 2010 and 2011. But the president’s anti-immigrantrhetoric and the end of Ice prioritizing criminals for deportation, in favor of targeting all undocumented immigrants, has provoked these communities and their allies to fight back harder than before.

And here in Philadelphia, home to one of the most aggressive Ice field offices in the country, the immigrant rights group Juntos has deemed a 4.5 square mile swath of the city a “community resistance zone” where people are actively trained to resist Ice.

This south Philadelphia community is a hodge-podge of immigrants and gentrifiers. Vietnamese restaurants edge one end of the community resistance zone, Italian cafes on the other and plenty of taquerias are sprinkled in between.

Recent Ice raids or car stops in the zone are mapped in an enormous printout posted in Juntos’s headquarters which sit in a shopping center stuffed with southeast Asian-owned businesses.

To launch the resistance zone in November 2017, Juntos volunteers knocked on 2,500 doors in two days. At each door volunteers told people about their rights and encouraged them to learn more at Juntos workshops, where community members such as Ponce have been trained on their rights and on how to share that information.

More than 1,300 people were trained that weekend and 500 families signed up for training.

The Juntos program went statewide this summer as volunteers traveled to other major Pennsylvania cities, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, to teach them how to create more community resistance zones.

We notice that people are trying to fight back across the state. In different cities, we see there is the desire and interest to organize

Marissa Piña Rodríguez

“That’s what’s so hopeful about doing this work,” said Marissa Piña Rodríguez, a community organizer at Juntos who lives in the resistance zone. “We notice that people are trying to fight back across the state. In different cities, we see there is the desire and interest to organize.”

It was that desire that also got the international human rights group, Witness, involved in immigrant training across the US.

Before Trump was elected, Witness helped activists and citizens across the world use technology to protect their rights, primarily through documenting incidents with video and photos. After the 2016 election, immigrant communities asked Witness’s US office for help with Ice, leading to training sessions across the US for its Eyes on Ice program.

Palika Makam, the US program coordinator at Witness, said it was important to make these resources accessible because of how important footage can be in an immigration case.

“One of the best ways of fighting your deportation case, or making a claim for asylum, or for being able to stay in the country is to actually have documentation of what happens when Ice shows up at your door or when Ice tries to arrest you or pick you up,” Makam said. “More times than not Ice violates their own policies or some constitutional law.”

Local advocacy groups use the footage Witness trains people to record to help identify what an Ice operation actually looks like, since the agency prizes secrecy in its operations and its officials are known to wear uniforms that hide their affiliation. “People we’ve spoken with have said they didn’t even know they were being arrested by Ice until they get to the processing center,” Makam said.

A training class for women in the Rio Grande Valley. Photograph: Witness.org

She said training courses for documenting Ice are popular across different immigrant communities, generations and genders. This summer, she taught three small communities on the border in Texas how to prepare for Ice and border patrol.

“The majority of people in those trainings were 60 plus, they were tías, they were abuelas,” Makam said.

At Juntos, Piña Rodríguez said, workshops are also attended mostly by women.

This summer, Ponce’s training was tested when she received a call while at dinner with her daughter and friends. Ponce’s friend was on the line and said she had left a campsite in the Pocono mountains minutes earlier but then was stopped in her car by a state police officer, who questioned the many undocumented passengers about their immigration status.

Ponce’s friend put the mother and daughter on speaker phone so they could hear the officer say: “Where are you from? Where are the papers?”

Together, the mother and daughter informed the woman of the passengers’ rights, which the best English speaker in the car, a 16-year-old girl, repeatedly told the officer.

“In those moments, you are scared, but you’ve been trained and can snap into action,” said Ponce.

One person in the car was arrested, but the rest were safe.

Ten years ago, Ponce would never have been a part of such resistance.

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She came to the US by herself in 2001, traveling a month across the desert on foot to get there from Puebla, Mexico. For four years Ponce saved money so her daughter, Vásquez, could cross too.

Vásquez was a teenager who didn’t know how to go to college without papers and found Juntos in a desperate search for resources. She is now protected by the temporary deportation relief, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), and ended up working with Juntos.

Then she brought her mother to rallies.

While Ponce was initially hesitant, Vásquez said her mother who is now the fiery rebel, demanding they attend each rally, march and meeting. Ponce said: “It is very important that the community and other communities remain together, especially under this administration where communities are under attack.”